About Ray Caesar

Like dreams, Ray Caesar’s digital images, which are inspired by the figurative paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, are manifestations of unsettling childhood memories and the subconscious workings of the mind. Created with Maya, a 3-D modeling software that Caesar used to make digital animations for the film and television industry in the late 1990s, Caesar’s images are fantastic, glamorous caricatures that recall the paintings of John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. “I take difficult memories and hidden emotions and turn them into something that at first glance seems pretty, then you notice something a little disturbing or an ingredient that you wonder why it might be there,” Caesar explains. “A little tainted, a little melancholy, a little funny, a little sad and a little taboo… I mix this with clocks and scissors and irons and knives and silk dresses hiding strange things un¬derneath.”